OFFSTAGE: Keith Urban Contest Winner Spends Day Behind the Lens

(CMT Offstage keeps a 24/7 watch on everything that’s happening with country music artists behind the scenes and out of the spotlight.)

I’m a bit of a contest voyeur. I love to keep an eye on them, knowing someone will win, even though I gave up ever hoping that winner would be me. So when I found out who won the Keith Urban videographer for a day contest, I had to know all about her experience. Her name is Christie Moser, she’s 31, and she lives and works in Raleigh, N.C..
So in other words, she’s a lot like the rest of us — a country fan who entered a contest and, this time, got really, really lucky.

“All I did was submit a photo on Keith’s website. It said to show how you get closer to Keith Urban, so I sent a picture of me and my girlfriends in front of his tour bus from when he was in town in 2009. We had our hands all over the picture of him,” she told me. “But I never ever thought in a million years I’d win.” A month later, she got the call that she had won and that she’d be leaving for Nashville the next week. “I was shocked and excited and elated,” she said.

Team Urban flew Moser and her husband to Nashville, got them a room at the Opryland Resort gave her a Flip camera and told her to get to work. She went to Urban’s Get Closer tour rehearsal in June and filmed his crowd banter, his performance and some of the fans’ reactions to being there. (Moser also got to spend a little time backstage with Urban, although that’s not in her video that’s up on his site now.) She told me she has loved country music for years, and Urban is one of her all-time favorite singers. So the day she spent filming him was a once in a lifetime opportunity. “I’d seen the contest on Facebook and knew I wanted to enter,” Moser said. “But you know, you hit ’submit’ and you think it just goes into la la land. Now, though, my faith in contests is completely renewed.”